No Life But This (6 page)

‘In this case, I think not,’ Xavier said. His voice was grim. ‘But I’ll tell her you came by.’

Bren hesitated, then said, ‘Yeah. Thanks, Granddad.’

The door closed, and Bren’s image returned in my hand. ‘Okay, what’s wrong?’

All I could do was look helpless.

‘Rose was crying,’ Bren said. ‘I could hear her. She was nearly screaming.’

Oh, coit! My hands clenched and my eyes closed.

‘Was she angry, or hurt?’ Bren asked.

I shook my head.

‘Screen, two minutes,’ Bren insisted, and the cell blinked off. I felt ill myself. I couldn’t explain this to Bren. Everything felt wrong, suddenly, as if the world was collapsing around me. Despite the fact that
my entire body ached and I felt sick to my core, I threw my screen across the room and clambered out of bed.

I was dizzy for a moment, but I wasn’t about to just sit here feeling like this. I could feel 42 in my mind, burning against my consciousness. Pushing me. Bren’s chime dinged on my screen. I ignored it.

I’m not sure what manias overtook me, but I was suddenly very clear as I stood up
out of that wretched bed. I felt dizzy, but there was no pain. I yanked monitors from my arms and chest and pulled plugs from walls so the machines wouldn’t announce the disconnection. If I was lucky, I’d have about ten minutes before the nurse on duty noticed I was no longer on her monitor screen. I threw on clothes without checking to see if they were clean.

I opened the door and peeped out
into the hallway. Everyone had moved back into the lab while I was sick. Quin’s room was right across from me. He’d left his door open and the holovision on. Quin was asleep, but some actor was loudly and casually killing another actor about halfway up his wall. I was glad. The noise would cover my departure.

I’d done this before. Snuck out of the lab or the dorm at night, crept away from the
safe place I was supposed to be. Sometimes I would go swimming, floating in the otherwise empty water in the pool at UniPrep, or even, if it was warm enough, at the manmade lake to the north of ComUnity, flickering through the instinctive minds of the fishes. Often I would flee up to the roof, try to find Jupiter in the stars. Europa was too far away to see without a telescope, but Jupiter was usually
pretty easy to spot. But I wasn’t well enough to swim, and I didn’t want the solitude stargazing lent me. I knew I wouldn’t be alone no matter what I did. 42 was whispering in the corner of my mind. Maybe she was the one driving me. I don’t know.

She used to do this, years ago. 42 would frequently sneak out the window alone, or with 11, or with me. We’d flee down the street and across the park
and under the hoverline past the bus depot, downtown. She’d even run away the night she died – it was mere chance they had dragged her back before it took her.

There was a club about twelve blocks away called the u
Night
ed. I walked alone in the moonlight, Rose’s image burning in my mind. Rose was crying. And I couldn’t comfort her … because I was the one who was hurting her. I was dying.

There
wasn’t much vice in the controlled, gated ComUnity, but they were careful to keep enough avenues for trouble open to keep the ‘inmates’ happy. The u
Night
ed pulsed loudly by itself in the night, amidst shops and boutiques that closed carefully by sundown. It was late enough there was no line outside the club. The club mostly catered to the college age interns who worked for UniCorp, but the youth
from all corners came and went, entering and exiting as if the club breathed them like oxygen. The music pulsed like a heartbeat, shaking the ground, humming through my back. The club a single animal, a growling beast, the only thing alive in the night.

There was a man checking ID at the door. This was no problem. 42 had pulled this off even when she was thirteen. She took hold of his hand and
told him it would be okay. I didn’t have a voice, but I knew how to do it. It was a different doorman, of course, than the one three years ago. He didn’t recognize me, and started when he saw my skin in the harsh light by the door, but I grabbed him and stared into his mind.
‘It’s all okay. Let me in.
’

He was tired, and not exactly sober, and the bass dazed his internal equilibrium. It was not
at all hard to push his mind. He let me pass.

Six months ago, I’d have felt guilty about this. I would never have pushed another person’s mind or read anything they didn’t want me to see. I would never have told anyone what I saw there. Since I’d known Rose, my sense of ethics had become a little skewed. What I wanted and what Rose needed seemed so much more important than clearly defined rules
of ethics and morality. 42 had never had such compunction – she was angry, like Quin, and willing to use any advantage her biology gave her. I hadn’t made any decisions about what was or wasn’t right until after she had died. I hadn’t had to – she took care of all that for me. Once she was gone, I needed to figure a lot of things out. I had created a persona with a deep code of ethics and a strong
sense of self – and all of that was slowly eroding, breaking away like the shoreline.

I dove into the sea of people, the music rattling my swollen brain, rolling through my exhausted body. The lights were dim and twisted with colour, strobing and dancing with the music. No one could make out faces, let alone complexion. Those around me were intoxicated with alcohol and nicohol and the sexual
excitement of each other. The music drowned out all sound but itself, so there was no speech. No one would notice I could not talk. I went from an Eepie to a nobody the moment I walked through the door. No wonder 42 had been drawn here. You couldn’t feel your impending death when you were a part of all this life. I closed my eyes and plunged on to the dance floor. I held my hands out. Bodies danced
against me, and minds flowed through my head – drunken minds, empty minds, excited minds, frightened minds, hungry minds. All of them charged and activated by the music and the lights and the pushing crowd of people.

I knew why 42 had come here the night she died. The knowledge was too much, the terror. I needed to be part of everyone else, to leave my body and my thoughts behind, to become one
with the whole. I let the music take me. My body pulsed with it, pounding, raging, tearing my way through the music as if I could break it apart. My eyes were closed, and amidst the muddled sea of people I could feel 42, almost feel her hands on my back, or dragging me through the crowd by my forearm. Her mind hummed inside mine, activated by the addled minds of everyone around me. I could barely
hear the music anymore. Just the bass, pounding again and again inside me. The decibels in the club were stronger than were safe, anyway. Eepies tended to be hypersensitive – when I was younger and 42 had snuck me in here I’d worn earplugs. If I didn’t have any, I’d make them out of damp napkins. I didn’t care tonight. I wanted to go deaf. I wanted to go blind. All my senses, taken away. If I were
to die, I could be washed away in this throng, swallowed by the beast, fade into a hundred intoxicated lives.

Rose was still there, though. Pure and perfect, her white rose petal skin, her sunshine hair, those dark, fathomless eyes, her burning, thorny, spiralling mind. Crying, because she was about to lose me. Like she had lost everything else. Her time, her whole world.

‘I’m dying!’
I told
everyone around me.
‘I’m dying!’

Some of the throng dissipated, frightened by the disconnected thought that I had pushed through the sea of people. But many more danced more wildly, crying out in the night, dragging themselves into life, pulling me with them. People who had never met before clutched each other on the dance floor. Couples kissed. Some did more than kiss. I wasn’t paying attention.
My time was ticking away. Rose was beyond reach – even if I could have won her, I wouldn’t have time. I wasn’t going to have the time. And 42 breathed down my neck, dancing in the throng, as real and present a creature as all these bodies around me. She ate up all the life that they were shedding like old skin. The ghost of her made herself into a real person again, just so long as they surrounded
me.

Then I saw her. Not in a fever dream behind my eyes, or an imagined glimpse behind everyone else’s writhing bodies. There she was, her blue skin dark in the strobing lights, her hair a midnight cloud. For two seconds I was scared, until I realized I’d called her. This was it. I was never going to have the time to win Rose, and I had gone here to find 42. She would take me with her. Take
me back down into death. I held my hands out to her, and she grabbed them, pulling me from the throng of people. She pulled me out of the sea of minds and into the corridor. Once I was free of everyone, I sagged against her, drained.

The mind holding me wasn’t 42. It was Tristan.

I pulled away, but she held me fast.
‘No you don’t!’
She told me, and took me by the wrist. I was too exhausted to
fight her. My mind was still a whirling pulse of sound. I had no idea how she’d managed to follow me in.

The answer to that mystery stood by the door, the doorman’s throat held in his grip like a slaughtered chicken. I don’t know what Quin was muttering at the poor man, but I could tell he thought Quin was the devil. Quin’s angry face relaxed when he saw me with Tristan, and he let go of the
doorman. ‘Thank you for your cooperation,’ he said with feigned politeness.

‘Burn it, noid!’ the doorman said. ‘What planet did you spring from?’

‘This one,’ Quin snapped, ‘but we haven’t been sprung yet. Is he okay?’ he asked Tristan.

Tristan nodded.
‘He’s dazed
,’ she signed.
‘Let's get him in the skiff.’

I was dragged, unprotesting, to a hoverboat on the road. I tripped on the red and yellow
curb and fell through the open door. I hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol, but the minds of everyone around me had left me easily as intoxicated. Suddenly the darkness in my mind was broken by space and light and the scent of tea rose. I opened my eyes. Rose leaned over me like the vision of an angel. I wanted to kiss her. She read the impulse, either in my mind or in my eyes, and she pulled away,
biting her lips. I sighed, and curled up on the floor of her limoskiff, hugging myself. Quin and Tristan clambered in behind me and folded themselves into the seats. ‘Let’s get him back,’ Quin said.

I wanted to shake my head. I wanted them to take me back to the club, where I could let everyone else drag me away – even into death, I didn’t care. Suddenly I felt Rose’s arms around me again. She
kissed my forehead. ‘Don’t,’ she whispered. How she saw me pulsed in my head, painful and twisted by Rose’s briar vision. I was hollow eyed and grey and sweating. My control was gone. I had been moaning quietly. 42 was laughing at me. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, and I didn’t trust myself. I looked at Rose.
‘I think you’d better let me go,’
I thought, very distinctly.

She blinked, but
pulled away. She turned to Quin and Tristan. ‘I need you to drop me off first. Can you get him home on your own? I have to get back to Unicorn before Xavier knows I’ve gone.’

‘Yeah,’ Quin said. ‘Thanks for lending us the skiff. We’ll send it back to you when we’re done.’

‘No trouble.’ She looked down at me. ‘Is he going to be all right?’

Tristan nodded.
‘He’s scared,’
she signed.

Rose looked
worried. ‘I am, too,’ she said. She crept down onto the floor with me and looked into my eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I …’ Tears leaked from her eyes. ‘I don’t see stasis the same way everyone else does. I never did. It was always how I dealt with problems, I didn’t mean for you to—’

I had to shut her up. I leaned my head forward and kissed her on the mouth. It was innocent, just a peck,
but it shocked her from her self torment. Her lips were very soft. Her forest pool eyes poured over me. She swallowed, and leaned in close to my ear. ‘I’m not going to let you die. Do you hear me? It’s not going to happen!’

I closed my eyes. With the heat of her breath on the side of my neck, I didn’t care if I died. 42 had been chased away by Rose’s kiss, and I was again alone in my mind. I
grabbed Rose tightly, and she gasped. I don’t know what I was thinking. I think I wasn’t. I was just open, and what she saw was
me
. All of me. She started trembling. After a second or a century, Quin pushed us apart. ‘We’re here. Now leave!’ he snapped at her.

Rose did, without another word.

The door slid closed, and Quin glared at me. ‘Lie down!’ he barked. ‘And stay there!’ He pushed me onto
the floor of the skiff and held me there, his blood boiling. I tried to get up. He held me down with his knee. ‘Lab!’ he snapped at the skiff. It beeped ‘uncertain destination.’ ‘E.P. Laboratories!’

The skiff hummed and skimmed off. My eyes were closed, so I missed most of the silent scuffle that followed as Tristan and Quin argued. I could only hear Quin’s replies. ‘I’m busy just now. Can I
ignore you later?’ ‘I’m not going to break him, I’m just going to bend him a little.’ ‘What do you expect me to do? Let him kill himself? That’s my job!’ Finally, Tristan dragged him off me, and I curled back up into my ball. ‘Fine,’ Quin snarled. ‘Let him die. I hate him anyway.’ This was followed by only a grunt, as he dismissed whatever it was Tristan signed in reply to this.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to deal with the repercussions of my escape. There’s a certain advantage to dying – no one thinks it’s fair to punish you. Dr Svarog, however, seemed disapproving as he looked me over. I ignored him, staring into the ceiling as if I could see through it to the stars above. Ultimately he sedated me.

As the sedative worked its way through my system, I kept
thinking of that kiss I had dropped on Rose. I had been very out of it. I would never have done such a thing otherwise. Not that I hadn’t thought of it. I thought about it every night when I went to bed. Every evening was an exercise in self-restraint as I imagined touching Rose’s white throat, kissing her soft red lips, feeling her fingertips against my skin. She helped me sleep.

But lately,
it had been frustrating to 42, who surged up out of my subconscious before the sedative took hold. She hovered there, in my mind, exuding disapproval. I didn’t want her there. I loved her, but I could never fully forgive her for dying on me.

‘
You burning sped,’
she told me before I passed out.

‘You burning sped,’ Rose said as I opened my eyes.

That seemed to be the consensus. Quin, 42, now
Rose. I blinked at her. She was sitting by my bed in the light from the window, working on her sketchbook. I sat up a bit. My head pounded, but not too badly. She set her sketchbook down on the chair and went to me. I glanced at the book – she was sketching my sleeping form.

She knelt by my bedside and took hold of my hand.
‘You scared me to death!’
she told me silently. It was a very spiky thought,
but I let her pierce me. I deserved it.

‘Sorry.’

‘Quin tells me this has been building for weeks.’

I was more surprised that Quin was willing to talk to her at all than that he had told her that, specifically.

‘Probably years,’
I pointed out.
‘I’ve been living on borrowed time since the eighth grade.
’

She frowned. She was unconvinced. ‘Your doctors thought that you had already gone through
it,’ she said. ‘And came out unscathed.’

I shook my head.
‘That wasn’t me. That was 42. I just went with her.’

‘Then why did it take so long for you to react, if all the others died that year? And why is Tristan okay?’

I didn’t know. I sent her one huge, long uncertainty attached to half a dozen theories and a dozen possibilities branching off each one, finally ending in a baffling and unanswerable
?????????

She sighed and let go of me. ‘Xavier and I spent all of yesterday looking for a solution.’

I frowned. All of yesterday?
‘How long have I been out?’
I signed.

‘The sedatives wore off yesterday afternoon, but you’ve been sleeping since then.’ She glanced up at the monitor above my head. I felt the wires on my scalp and I knew it was monitoring my brain waves. These had let her know
I wasn’t dying, so she let me sleep. With a resigned tug I pulled the wires from my head. The machine beeped angrily, and finally went silent.

‘Sorry about those,’ Rose said. ‘I didn’t feel like stopping them.’

I nodded that I didn’t blame her.

‘I’m sorry about the stasis thing,’ Rose said.

‘
I understand,’
 I signed to her.

‘I just thought … it would buy you time to find a cure. I didn’t think
…’

I gently took her hand.
‘I do understand,’
I told her.
‘That wasn’t the problem. Please try to understand about this. I’d be in there forever. There is no cure for “There shouldn’t be anything wrong.”’

Her next thoughts surprised me no end.
‘There might be.’

I let go of her hand, blinking. She grinned at me. ‘There’s nothing Xavier can’t solve. He’s brilliant, and so are his kids. You know
Bren’s mom is head designer in the graphics department. Well, his Uncle Ted is actually a scientist, and he went up to Europa a few years ago to study the signalling … thing … that the M9 microbes do. And how to keep them alive. Xavier’s been in contact with him since I told him you were sick.’

‘
Why?’
I signed.

‘Because I wanted you better.’

I knew for a fact that communications to Europa
were usually sent on a weekly feed, rather than a continuous stream. The only continuous messaging system to Europa was the emergency feed. Jamal always had to wait to hear about anything from his family, except for the time he’d disappeared and they had to inform Captain Jagan that his son might be dead. Jamal had only skipped out to the beach with some college friends without telling anyone, but
that was the only time I had ever heard of a communication outside of the weekly package. Xavier Zellwegger was pulling some serious strings even talking to his son.

‘
What’s he say?’

‘Well, he studies the microbe itself. He’s been trying to keep it alive, so they can study it on Earth. You know they won’t survive in a tank. Well, apparently, he’s managed to extend their life spans with low level
electro impulses, echoing the currents in the natural ocean. They
think
that your problem might be a flaw in your cellular communication. Like you’re not getting the right signals or something.’

I nodded and took her hand. ‘
They’ve always thought that. It hasn’t done them any good. They can’t turn Earth into Europa.’

‘Which is why Ted wants you up there,’ Rose said. ‘He thinks the team on the
Minos
might be able to figure out something. They’re the ones who created you, really. It’s a risk, and Dr Svarog thinks we’re nuts. But it’s a chance, right? So … do you think you want to go?’

I blinked. Wait a minute. Send me to Europa? Were they really thinking it? I didn’t think they could cure me, not really. But to escape Earth, to travel to Jupiter, to see the moon of my origin …! My heart
beat a little faster in my chest, and I hoped it didn’t mean I was going to be dead in a minute. My hands were shaking as I signed,
‘You mean it?’

Rose only looked confused, so I grabbed both her hands with me.
‘Are you serious?’

Rose closed her eyes as the immense joy I felt poured into her head. It was almost painful to her. I pulled away.

‘Sorry,’
I signed.

‘It’s okay, I know,’ Rose said,
though her voice was a little shaky. Then she looked up at me and laughed. ‘I have
never
seen you look this happy.’

I realized I was smiling – really smiling, my expressionless face twisted of its own accord into a sunny grin.

‘I take it this means you want to go?’

I lay back down on the bed, wordless with excitement.

‘You realize this is experimental, right?’ she said. ‘We have no idea if
this trick of Ted’s will even work, and—’

I stopped her with a hand on her arm.
‘Rose. It’s Europa. Procedures or not, I don’t care. There could be nothing there but ice and an oxygen unit, I’d still want to go.’

Rose grinned. ‘I guess I’ll tell Xavier to make the arrangements.’ She stood up. ‘There’s a colony transport leaving from Luna Base at the end of the week. I think we can go through
the preliminary quarantine in that time.’

‘
We?’
I signed.

‘Of course. I’m going with you.’

I think a beam of sunlight might have passed through me at that point I was so happy. ‘Xavier’s been postponing a UniCorp visit to Europa, anyway. He was going to wait and send a delegation in another year or so, but he can do it himself.’

Even the knowledge that Xavier was coming with us did not dampen
my spirits. ‘
You and me. At Europa.’

‘Mm-hm.’ She kissed my forehead as she lay me back down. ‘You get some rest and we’ll start the legislation. I’ll tell Dr Svarog to start your quarantine regime. He won’t be happy about it.’

‘
Why not?’
I signed.

Rose shook her head. ‘He thinks stass might not be good for you, but I’ll tell him not to worry. After all, it never killed me.’